This month’s update of Adobe XD is about more than new features and the continued improvements we make based on your feedback — it represents a major milestone in our vision to provide everyone with the tools to design, prototype, and share user experiences.

Introducing the Starter Plan

Starting today, we’re introducing a new Starter Plan for Adobe XD and it’s available to everyone for free. Included in this plan is ongoing access to the desktop version of XD on both Mac and Windows 10, including all the design and prototyping capabilities, along with the mobile preview apps on iOS and Android.

You can create an unlimited number of XD documents, export assets for production, and create videos to share your experiences. Also included is the ability to have one active shared prototype and one active shared design spec, with the option to upgrade should you need unlimited sharing. If you currently have an XD single app plan or a Creative Cloud all apps plan, then you already have unlimited sharing included.

The future of experience design

While we’re excited to introduce the starter plan, we’re even more excited about what’s to come.

Over the coming months you can expect to see significant progress in advanced prototyping and animation capabilities, new team collaboration features, and support for extending XD via plug-ins as we continue on our journey to provide you with an industrial-grade, end-to-end platform for UX design.

To support our efforts to create an extensible platform for creativity, we’ve announced a $10M fund for designers and developers to encourage the development of plug-ins and integrations with Adobe XD and Creative Cloud. You can read more about that here.

Enhancements in May release

Getting back to this month’s release, we’ve focused our attention on enhancements that increase productivity when working in XD.

Want to see the new enhancements in action? Check out Adobe Live from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT May 15-17, 2018, to see top UX designers using the latest features in Adobe XD.

We’ve also released 5 new UI resources made by top designers to help you get started on your next project. Learn more and download them for free here.

Swap symbols

You can now swap symbols on the design canvas by dragging a symbol from the assets panel and dropping it directly onto the symbol you want to replace. From there, all copies of the symbol on the canvas will automatically be replaced. This productivity improvement means you no longer have to search and manually replace all instances of a symbol, one at a time.

We have more enhancements to symbols and the assets panel coming in subsequent updates, so watch for more here.

Paste to multiple artboards

Whenever you can replace a repetitive task with a single click, your productivity increases. The paste to multiple artboards feature is a perfect example. Simply copy any object to the clipboard, select one or more target artboards, and paste. Your content will be placed in the same X and Y location on the target locations. If the target artboard is smaller than the source artboard the content will be centered.

Photoshop integration improvements

In this release we’ve dramatically reduced the time it takes to open your source Photoshop documents in Adobe XD, allowing you to leverage your earlier projects or the work of other team members. In addition to conversion improvements, we’ve extended compatibility to support stroke and image effects. We preserve the original stroke appearance in Photoshop by creating fully editable groups of stroke objects. Image effects are flattened during the conversion process to preserve visual fidelity.

Sketch integration improvements

In this release we’ve improved how XD handles Sketch files with multiple pages, with visual separators for each of these areas on the design canvas. We’ve also improved spacing attributes with imported text, image pattern fill support, maintaining global and document-specific colors, as well as converting hotspot links to connecting handles in prototype mode.

Password-protected Design Specs

Further adding support for password protection on prototypes in our last release, we’ve extended this to published Design Specs (Beta), so now you can share both prototypes and design specs with a password being required to view them by stakeholders.

UX community

We’d love to continue the dialogue. You can follow our handle @AdobeXD for updates, or reach the team on Twitter using #AdobeXD. You can also talk to us using Facebook, where we share videos and updates, as well as answer questions during live sessions.